christopher nolan's dunkirk

Around 12 years old The Dark Knight was my favourite movie. I’d tell everyone this, as if it was a representative badge of my identity. My friends and me memorized every line The Joker had and quoted him non-stop. I had ambitions of growing up to be a filmmaker and mimicking Christopher Nolan’s career seemed like the pinnacle of what I could ever achieve. I wanted to be the next Christopher Nolan. By then, along with The Dark Knight he’d directed Batman Begins, Memento, The Prestige, Insomnia and Following. I thought Nolan was the best filmmaker who’d ever lived, no debate possible.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me to go see Dunkirk with him and with nothing better to do I dragged myself there. I went in with an open mind despite the low expectations I have for any Nolan movie and left the cinema disappointed, arguing with my friend who loved it.

So what happened between then and now? Below is me trying to find out. Here is a review of Dunkirk wrapped in my wider thoughts about Nolan as a director in general.

First: a bit of context. Christopher Nolan is hailed by many film fans as the second coming of Jesus, or at least of Stanley Kubrick. The internet has an endless supply of reviews and opinion pieces on why Nolan is so great, praising how he manages to make big blockbuster spectacle movies that also manage to be complex and original and not talk down to audiences like the normal tacky Hollywood schlock. Between Dark Knight and Dunkirk Nolan directed Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. His films are that unique thing in modern Hollywood: non-sequels/remakes/reboots made on big budgets and attracting big audiences. I can understand supporting Nolan as a symbol of something more than his films. Whatever the quality of his work, he’s at least commendable for making original stuff on a big scale, but that doesn’t mean his films get a free pass.

It’s worth mentioning Nolan’s fans (Nolanites the internet calls them). No artist’s work can be rated based on the response of fans or critics, that’s totally separate from the work itself, but Nolanites can be an extreme bunch. Around the release of The Dark Knight Rises any reviewers who published negative reviews were bombarded with death threats, some sites took negative reviews down because of the backlash and hacking attempts they were getting. (Rises received great reviews from most sites - not enough for Nolanites apparently.) This happens whenever one of Nolan’s movies releases. On some of the only mildly negative reviews Dunkirk received the comments sections are filled with comments by people calling the reviewer a hack, or saying the site only published the review as “clickbait”, or simply showing confusion of how anyone could write something negative about such a masterpiece. As if anything negative said about Nolan must either be a lie or some sort of mistake, or the idea that having an opinion that differs from the mainstream means it must be wrong.

I admit that these two things - the grandeur packed on by most people to everything Nolan does; the fans and their backlash to anything negative said about him - makes me dislike Nolan more than I already did. There’s also that other internet argument that crops up whenever someone is being disagreed with: if you don’t like Nolan’s films why do you bother watching them/writing stuff about them? I don’t really think people should have to answer this. It’s a stupid argument. But, to me, I’d like to know why a filmmaker I once loved now represents lots of things I don’t like about modern filmmaking.

In the rare criticism of Nolan that does appear on the internet there’s three common flaws brought up. They’re valid, to a degree, but don’t explain my problems with his films. They are:

1. His films are filled with plot holes/lapses in logic/continuity errors. This obviously isn’t a big deal; all films feature these to some degree. But many Nolan films feature them a lot more than usual. Almost every scene of The Dark Knight Rises features such a glaring lapse in logic it took me out of the movie to remind me how lazy the writing/filmmaking is. Bruce Wayne appears to teleport across the world to a city that is on lockdown and can’t be entered by anyone. Bane and his henchman magic motorbikes out of thin air. A key plot point is revealed to Bruce Wayne in a dream he has. And that ending. Alfred sees Bruce, who he thought was dead, for the first time in a long while, and just nods and walks away. This is such a misunderstanding of these characters, and of normal human behaviour, that it’s actually a little bonkers.  
2. Nolan can’t write exposition to save his life. Screenwriting 101 says that the explanation of plot details/context of the story must be explained to the audience as smoothly and stealthily as possible. Characters must talk naturally instead of giving outright explanations. “Show, don’t tell”. Nolan is weak at this. Many critics say that the first half of Inception is a long dialogue-driven explanation setting up the second half. I can understand Nolan’s choice to do this here, and also in his more riddling work (like The Prestige), my problem is with the dialogue in Nolan’s films in general: characters spend their time explaining, not speaking, sign-posting where the story is headed, instead of existing as characters themselves. But this is another criticism that is easily side-stepped as things like the reveal of exposition lies in the background of a film.
3. Nolan’s action scenes are badly constructed. They break basic filmmaking rules of continuity and spacial awareness making things hard to understand. This is the go-to for someone criticising Nolan. And it’s a legitimate problem. There’s nothing wrong with a quick-cutting editing style, or with using multiple cameras to film one sequence and finding the right flow of shots during editing. Look at the films of Michael Mann: Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies. The quick-cutting style works because every shot reveals something new and has a reason to be there. There’s a conciseness and purpose to every image. Nolan’s movies aren’t like this. His shots add up on top of each other with little meaning for the editing/cutaways, nothing new being revealed by the constantly changing perspective. There’s no flow between shots, no energy built up during the action scenes. But, once again, this is something that exists in the background for most viewers. Most action movies are filmed in this style and people don’t seem to mind it, Nolan is no different.

But these problems all have the air of nitpicking about them. Watching Nolan’s movies I know there’s something more I dislike. Nobody truly dislikes something because of nitpicking.

Where to begin? I’ll start with The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger as The Joker is one of my favorite performances ever. Many great bits of acting are based around subtlety and showing emotions and motives without outright saying them, and there are subtleties behind Ledger’s performance too, but really Ledger’s Joker is pure villainy. He lights up every scene he’s in. He gleams with bombastic terror and looks like he’s enjoying every moment of it. The Joker has no motive but to create chaos and to show that all others deep down just want chaos too. I think Nolan loved his version of The Joker because he gets all the best scenes and best lines in any of Nolan’s films.

The rest of The Dark Knight, the Joker-less scenes, feel clunky in comparison. The characters tend to do things for no other reason than that that is what Nolan has decided they’ll do. Harvey Dent needs to change into Two Face and become the bad guy, that is what Nolan decided on, so The Joker gives him a quick speech and he does a 180 turn on his whole life. Gotham City makes very stupid and improbably choices, like choosing a boat full of inmates to be among the first evacuated, all because this is needed so The Joker can do a very awkwardly staged “social experiment” and Nolan can preach on the goodness of the human spirit. The ending sees Batman taking responsibility for multiple killings he didn’t commit. It doesn’t seem like the logical thing to do, it comes out of nowhere really, but Nolan wanted a saucy twist for the ending so this had to happen. This is a problem I have with Nolan’s films: his characters don’t act like people, even caricatures, they’re just two dimensional puppet figures that act on automation to get the story done. I’ve seen a lot of writers talk about their characters “growing a mind of their own”, the story and the dialogue coming naturally after a point because the characters have been so well put together. Nolan’s characters seem like the opposite: blanks set only the task of acting out the basic outline of the story.

And this connects to a bigger problem I have with Nolan: he deals with surfaces instead of the layers that exist beneath them. In Inception the main gang of characters specialise in entering people’s dreams and being able to plant ideas in their heads. Since my first viewing I’ve thought that saying these men go into “dreams” was a clear bit of miswording. Inception features no dreams. Dreams are a great mystery: they have no sense of time, consciousness instead floating from one event to the next in a realm made up of images patched together by remnants of the mind. People are still researching into the mechanics of dreams. My old Psychology teacher compared dreams to guitar feedback, the brain shutting down for sleep like the guitar no longer being played but still reverberating noise. A Nightmare on Elm Street, the original 80s movie I mean, understands dreams and uses the confusion found in them to great effect. The settings the characters of Inception enter aren’t dreams, they’re monotone locations like some empty city streets, some rainy city streets and a warehouse, all meant to represent the insides of a person’s mind but hardly differing from each other. I imagine most filmmakers would be excited to play with this premise and the ability to visually show the insides of a person’s mind that may not show on the surface. Nolan doesn’t show any excitement. One “dream” is set on a military base on a snowy mountainside that has no purpose in the story, or in the psyche, other than to provide the team with some fodder to shoot their way through on their mission. A lot of people acted like Inception’s “dream inside a dream inside a dream” idea was a work of genius. And on paper it does sound great. Nolan is a fantastic ideas guy. The original spark of his films is always very creative, but the execution of Inception is the work of someone with a lack of imagination, not a surplus of it.

Interstellar. On paper it sounds great: the Earth is dying and a small team of astronauts must explore space and touch down on multiple planets to see if they are inhabitable, the fate of the human race hanging in the balance. It’s a big idea with big stakes. You’d think each planet would let the filmmakers’ imaginations run wild. And, well… there’s an icy planet. And one with water on it. And there’s not much time spent on any of them. Most of the film is spent in space and yet space, the great unknown, “the final frontier” for humanity, is treated with little sense of awe or mystery. Neither the claustrophobia of Alien or the endless possibilities of Star Trek. It’s just a dark screen for Nolan’s stick figures to walk in front of. In the film’s climax the main character (played by Matthew Mcconaughey) falls through a rift in space and time (it’s been awhile since I watched the movie so I can’t recount this section in detail). He sees screens into events from the past including his own. I instantly thought of the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, not of that film itself but of someone trying to imitate the existential wow it generates. It signposts to the viewer that they are watching something grand and profound but I can’t remember taking anything away from this section other than some unique visuals.

This is common to all Nolan films. The way they are made tell you they are great works of art, future classics, whether they are or not.

This brings me to Dunkirk. Nolan usually films stories with sci-fi or fantastical elements but here is the true story of the battle of Dunkirk, in which the British army were pushed to the coast of France by the German army during World War 2. Dunkirk is told from three perspectives - on land; at sea; in the air - interwoven with each other, each taking place respectively over a week, a day and an hour (which the film smugly announces with title cards during the opening as if the audience couldn’t work this out for themselves). My main problem with Dunkirk is a problem I have with all Nolan films but that is taken to the max here: the film has no moments of pause, no time for rest or reflection, just one long onslaught of action that never lets up. As soon as the action of one section calms down the film cuts to another section where the action has started to heat up again. Hans Zimmer’s musical score blasts over the action for the entire run time; a ticking clock plays in the background to further add tension. The problem is that action is only really action when you have something to contrast it with. If a movie has no quieter moments, no interludes to the action, it’s more likely to make you exhausted than elated. When there’s no moments of reflection I question if there’s anything being reflected on. .

Music blasted, artillery exploded, boats were turned over, the battle continued, but there was no room to move between it all. I was bored by Dunkirk more than anything else. Tom Hardy plays the main fighter pilot but barely says a line for the whole movie. I felt no tension because there were no actual characters. And yet a lot of critics have praised Dunkirk’s lack of characterization or backstory and its minimal dialogue. I understand the argument: instead of soldiers showing pictures of their families before their climactic death scene, or reminiscing about life before the war, or the kind of sentimentality found in a movie like Saving Private Ryan, Nolan presents war only as a struggle for survival. This is a story about the great loss war causes not about the characters. But there’s something about this method that didn’t connect with me. If Nolan wanted to tell a war story of pure survival, of the restless feeling of wanting to be home, why did he structure his film with an interwoven narrative like a mind game that needs to be solved? Why jump from one narrative to the other when trying to emphasize claustrophobia? Why pick such a famous real world event if you’re not going to bring up any questions of politics or morality?

Dunkirk is indeed a change of direction for Nolan by making a film in the real world but it is still one of his riddles. It is more of a board game simulating a battlefield on a big budget, not a study of what happens to a man when he is thrown into war.  

I think I can now put my finger on why I dislike Nolan’s films so much. As I’ve said, Nolan is a great “ideas guy”. His films make for very exciting trailers. But I’ve never found anything deeper than that. For all the grand artistry other people see in his films I only see very loud musical scores, gimmicky plot devices and big budgets. I couldn’t possibly tell other people that they can’t find anything deeper in Nolan’s films, by the success of them I’d guess there’s a lot of people who find depths beneath the surface of Nolan’s films, but to me they are empty vessels, moments of action or puzzlement without context.

Nolan is praised for intellectuality and originality but these are really shiny surfaces with nothing underneath.